Debate mapping

In the not so distant past I had the pleasure of attending the fourth international online deliberation event at Leeds University. At the time it was clear that there was a useful track of research around argument visualisation.

It’s great news, then, that the Centre for Digital Citizenship has managed to secure some FP& monies for the IMPACT project.

The IMPACT project is researching and developing a set of tools for facilitating online, public deliberation of policies. These tools include:

a tool for reconstructing arguments from sources distributed on the Internet

a tool for modelling the legal effects of policies

a tool for soliciting public opinion about policies

a tool for visualising and tracking the arguments for and against policies (PolicyCommons)

Moroever, a a new prototype tool called PolicyCommons — http://policycommons.leeds.ac.uk/. addresses a need to help users make sense of the range of publicly-expressed opinions about government policies. This is based on the cohere platform.

According to their blog:-“PolicyCommons will generate visual summaries of public statements about policies being proposed by governments. In particular, the tool will display arguments for and against policy-proposals as browsable debate maps.

Users will be able to browse these debate maps and follow links from the visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents.

Ultimately, the aim of PolicyCommons is to support greater participation in the democratic process, as well as to improve the openness and accountability of the democratic process.”